Most of us appreciate when our compiler lets us know we made a mistake. Finding coding errors early lets us correct them before they embarrass us in a code review or, worse, turn into bugs that impact our customers. Besides the compulsory errors, many projects enable additional diagnostics by using the -Wall and -Wextra command-line options. For this reason, some projects even turn them into errors via -Werror as their first line of defense. But not every instance of a warning necessarily means the code is buggy. Conversely, the absence of warnings for a piece of code is no guarantee that there are no bugs lurking in it.
In this article, I would like to shed more light on trade-offs involved in the GCC implementation choices. Besides illuminating underlying issues for GCC contributors interested in implementing new warnings or improving existing ones, I hope it will help calibrate expectations for GCC users about what kinds of problems can be expected to be detected and with what efficacy. Having a better understanding of the challenges should also reduce the frustration the limitations of the available solutions can sometimes cause. (See part 2 to learn more about middle-end warnings.)
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